School of Forest Sciences

Sustainability impact assessment (SIA) studies how factors such as policy, management or technology development affect the sustainability of a sector or a chain of value adding processes and helps decision-makers to assess impacts of decision alternatives. The Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment (ToSIA) was developed as a transparent platform for assessing the sustainability impacts of changes in Forest Wood Chains (FWC). The adopted approach is flexible and can thus be applied to other similar domains and the scope of analysis can be defined by the user. Target users of the tool and its assessments include scientists, consultants and policy makers. ToSIA implements SIA by calculating material flows of an interlinked sequence of processes and combining each process’ volume with indicators of environmental, social, and economic sustainability, which can then be aggregated for process groups or the whole FWC. The results are compared to other results derived with alternative ass...

The volume of research is increasing along with the steadily increasing digitization of research and the advent of open science. This puts a pressure on research information systems, which try to work with various research output types (e.g. publications and datasets) and the related information. This is even more of an acute issue for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). When compared to e.g. natural sciences, SSH's representation in various forms of research outputs is often lacking in research databases. One solution is national CRIS systems, which aim to provide a realistic and disciplinarily balanced picture on the research outputs produced by various research organizations in a given country. To achieve this, metadata for research outputs need to be consistent and, above all, interoperable. One component in this is to use persistent identifiers (PIDs). This paper presents a case of interoperability of SSH publications, datasets, and infrastructures. Linking research outpu...

Forestry in Malå, northern Sweden, coexists with other land uses. Reindeer husbandry is in the area for centuries and requires large areas of grazing land. Competing land uses may threaten the Malå Sami village. The aim of the study was to evaluate increased consideration in forest management towards 1) reindeer husbandry, 2) nature and 3) a combination of the two. These scenarios were compared with forest management as it was in 2009. Results indicate that all three scenarios lead to a decrease in annual harvesting volumes of 0.2 to 0.4 million m. Forest industry dominated the economic viability in the area. Forest management adapted to the needs of reindeer husbandry resulted in less potential for yearly harvest, employment and profits from forest industry. On the other hand, it led to an increase in growing stock and consequently the potential for carbon sequestration over time. Indeed the increased sequestration would compensate for all fossil emissions of carbon from the Fore...

Briefing #1 1. FAIRCORE4EOSC Project kick-off meeting was held 29-30 June 2022, and all FAIRCORE4EOSC management bodies and work packages are operational. 2. Technical Bridging Team (TBT), the alignment mechanism to coordinate strategic technical developments between FAIRCORE4EOSC, FAIR-IMPACT, EOSC Future and EOSC Association, is in place. Watch the interviews. 3. The project visual identity has been adapted to EOSC Association´s co-branding guidelines.

A Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment (ToSIA) has been developed for assessing sustainability impacts of forest-wood-chains (FWCs). Sustainability is determined by analysing environmental, economic, and social sustainability indicators for all the production processes along the FWC. Results of the tool can be analysed at an aggregated level for complete FWCs, but for some applications it is useful to assign the indicator results to products of the chain. This paper presents a procedure in ToSIA to assign sustainability impacts to multiple output products of FWC. The procedure was tested and demonstrated with an example FWC from Scandinavia that included furniture and bio-energy production. Two different allocation criteria, carbon-based and economic valuebased, were applied with different options for assigning the impacts on the sub-products of the chain. Three indicators representing the three pillars of the sustainability were chosen to demonstrate the procedure: production costs (economic), employment (social) and transport intensity (environmental). The results indicated that the allocation criteria greatly affect the indicator results assigned to the different products of FWCs. The selection of the allocation criterion depends on the question approached and on the availability of the needed process related data. The data availability is assured for the carbonbased allocation within ToSIA, as following the carbon flows within the chain is mandatory for any ToSIA application. Economic values of products, on the other hand, are more closely linked to the aims of the production processes of the value chains and are thereby meaningful allocation criteria in many cases. The allocation procedure of ToSIA was proved to be flexible allowing different criteria and still consistent in allocation of the various sustainability impacts of the FWCs.

The aggregation of the technical specifications in January into deliverable D1.2 "FAIRCORE4EOSC Technical Specifications" marked an important achievement for the project because the technical specifications are needed to kick-start the the development of the nine new EOSC Core components that the project will deliver to improve the discoverability of research outputs.

The Consortium Agreement has been accepted and the signature process is nearly finished. 2. Operational work on technical specifications has progressed. 3. FAIRCORE4EOSC took part in the EOSC Symposium 2022. In addition to the sessions and talks, it was a pleasure to meet with the other EOSC-related Horizon Europe project representatives at the get-together organised by EOSC Focus and discuss with other actors from the EOSC ecosystem to further strenghten the connections between all parties, especially in terms of techninal coordination, where the Technical Bridging Team is going to have regular communication with other HE projects.

Biomass as a renewable energy source is an alternative to fossil fuels. Due to its lower energy density compared to fossil fuels, different ways of converting biomass into an energy-dense fuel are sought after. Fast pyrolysis of biomass into pyrolysis oil represents such method, allowing wider substitution of fossil fuels. Pyrolysis is an energy-intensive process but its efficiency can be improved by integration of pyrolysis reactor into a combined heat and power plant. In this study environmental analyses are conducted on the production of 50 000 tons of pyrolysis oil from wood to substitute for heavy fuel oil. The pyrolysis oil is produced either in a stand-alone reactor or as an integrated part of a combined heat and power plant. The combined heat and power plant is wood and peat fueled, producing of 820 GWh of energy. The cradle-to-grave emissions of CO 2-eq, NO x , SO 2, and PM are calculated by using two methods: 1) life cycle assessment and 2) the Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment. Reductions in environmental loads of over 75% in (fossil) CO 2-eq and over 90% in NO x , SO 2, and PM can be achieved when heavy fuel oil is replaced by pyrolysis oil. The pyrolysis is 20% more efficient if integrated with CHP production. The potential reductions vary several percent between the applied methods because of different system boundaries. Nevertheless, integrating the pyrolysis reactor into a combined heat and power plant appears as the best option irrespective of the method used. Extending the system boundaries with the life cycle inventories results in significant increases of emissions in many processes; however, combustion in plants has a dominant role in overall emissions but is not subject to the boundary extensions, and thus, the totals of emissions between the methods are nearly the same.